Editor's Letter

… there is only a thin line between what is so new to us that it changes our way of thinking and what is so new to us that we can't recognize it as a coherent thought …

If the virus were a dream, it would be the kind where one is in the experience but unaware of what is happening. It is not fully understood why some get sickened by the infection but not others. Whether one has immunity after testing positive is not clear. How long the danger will last, or even if we'll ever be entirely free from it, is not yet known. These uncertainties upend our present lives, and our imagined futures, and this gives the virus psychic power. While the unknown can be filled in any number of ways, the emotional and psychic meaning that might help with symbolizing our experience cannot be assigned when so much remains unknowable. This is a time dominated by unrepressed fears of death and too much novelty. Boundaries blur between reality and imagination, and internal states become unstable and ambiguous. It is easy to lose a sense of place — in the world, and within oneself. How peculiar it feels to “shelter in place.” With workplace and home now indistinguishable, and the treatment frame sharply altered, where is that?

Sense of place is altered or lost as fear changes the rhythms of the city. Sidewalks filled with people shift from feeling safe to feeling frightening: walking in the middle of the street stops being defiant or foolhardy; it is now respectful and prudent. The location of self and the way that identity affects how we move through the world is the question of our time, and it connects directly to current social upheaval. Feminist and social activist bell hooks writes about the politics of location and how a different standpoint or position can be radical or transgressive by moving one out of “one's place.” Whether or not one is forced to the edges through oppression, deprivation, or the vagaries of a pandemic, as margin